Abstract: The impact of temporal and spatial motion correlation on reference frame selection is distinct for different block size modes.In this paper, we study the statistical properties of video sequences and the spatial correlation in video frames first, and then propose an fast adaptive multiple reference frame selection algorithm based on motion correlation.It can take out the reference frames that are not necessary for motion compensation, and reduce the complexity of coding adaptively according to the features of the video sequences.The experimental results show that our algorithm can save more than 40%of coding time on average with negligible loss.